One of the universal truths of MMORPG PvP is that an organized group will always beat a random group. Now that Blizzard enabled people to form groups using their RealID, a good number of players are using this feature together with the addon "Preform AV Enabler" to run 10-man premades for WSG and other battlegrounds, with the goal of getting the 250,000 honor kill achievement. The power difference between such a premade and a random group is such that the premade group can often simply farm honor kills while camping the enemy graveyard.

Needless to say that takes the fun out of the game for those players who just wanted a fun random vs. random PvP battle. But requests to Blizzard to change things so as to prevent premade groups from spawn camping and HK farming on random groups on the official forums always degenerate into shouting matches. Which then get deleted by the moderators, giving the impression to the affected players that Blizzard doesn't hear them or doesn't care.

I think that while WoW isn't the best of PvP games to start with, it would at least be a better PvP game if it did a better job of matching groups of equal strength against each other. And that very much requires to let RealID premade groups fight ONLY against other premade groups, and random groups only against other random groups. That of course would provoke protests from the HK farmers, but frankly, people who are bored enough to want to farm 250,000 honor kills are likely to quit the game soon anyway.
- posted by Tobold Stoutfoot @ 6:50 PM Permanent Link
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Even in a real random group vs. random group match, Blizzard does a terrible job matching the relative strength of the two groups (which is to say, they don't do any matchmaking at all). Whenever you hit the start gate, you can simply check which team has more healers and project the likely winner pretty much every time. If the opposing team has 3 healers and yours has none, you can leave ASAP or choose to endure a senseless pounding.

That's just terrible and I don't see how an addon that lets you queue premade groups for random (non pre-made) battlegrounds isn't an exploit.

The justifications in that thread of the people doing it exemplify everything that's wrong with the competitive aspects of WoW. Things like:

"I just do it for fun, I like to win 100% of the time, who wouldn't?"

or

"You got farmed, yeah, you jelly. Nothing wrong with premades."

/facepalm

The complete inability to understand ruining the fun of everyone you encounter by exploiting an unfair advantage is sickening but sadly not surprising. Blizzard created the Rated battlegrounds to avoid this sort of thing in the first place.

Right now a big part of it is blizzards fault. Their queue system tries to queue you against other premades, but is extremely lax. After at most a minute or two, in most cases, it'll random queue you.

I don't think it's a bad thing. I love it. I'd rather be able to play with friends, than with random people. If that means i don't lose as much, that's a bonus. Your odds of going against a premade is pretty rare, as it is, anyway.

If you don't want to do arenas or Rated battle grounds, all that is left are randoms. They're the PvP equivalent of 5mans. If you're gearing new alts, or just for fun.

What would you suggest? I don't really want to go in as a group to "pwn noobs", but i do want to play with my pvp friends outside arena/rbg.

I usually end up using the addon more often with trade chat pugs- which still end up stomping people into the ground. Even with no gear requirements, or VOIP, or in some cases, even a strategy.

Personally, i find losing because we have bots and afkers on our team much more frustrating. (and vice versa, it takes some of the thrill of a win away).

Appropriate matchmaking run counters to the MMO ethos, which is that the guy who spends more time gets to kick the shit out of the guy who doesn't.

I can't complain. One of my favorite wow activities was getting on my warrior with great pvp-gear and absolutely murdering randoms at 4 AM. For some reason the gear quality of the randoms dropped badly every night at that time until 6 am.

Sometimes I got more kills than the entire rest of my team combined.

Point being, the underlying ethos of WoW runs contrary to the idea of a good match maker. Why waste your time grinding honor points and arena points, when you can have just as more fun (and a life) playing against equally geared players? Where there is no treadmill, there is no MMO.

"An" achievement, I wouldn't say it is a sign of boredom. But any achievement with the number 250,000 in it certainly is.

What does having a big number in the achievement matter? Because it's going to take a relatively significant amount of time to complete? Isn't having the ability to repeat an action over and over the opposite of boredom?

If their numbers are right I'm pretty sure they'll get this achievement a lot faster than I got Insane in the Membrane, for example. I was neither bored with the game when I got it nor likely to quit the game soon after I got it.